The applicant is requesting five years of funding through the Mentored Career Development Award (K01) to enhance her skills and knowledge to conduct research on service use and participation by families of physically abused and neglected children. The ultimate goal is to have the expertise to offer empirically supported recommendations on the factors that affect service use and participation and to develop and test interventions to increase participation in services by families referred because of maltreatment. The applicant's practice experiences in schools and child welfare, her doctoral research training, and her NIMH funded dissertation research provide a strong foundation for the proposed K Award training and research activities. The proposed training goals include gaining skills and knowledge in qualitative methods and analysis, quantitative data analysis, intervention research, ethical issues in research with at-risk children and their families, and the factors that affect their recruitment and retention in services and research. This training and experience will prepare the applicant to conduct studies that yield valid and practice-relevant findings about service participation by families of maltreated children. The research plan consists of three studies that complement the proposed training activities. The research studies focus on caregiver service use and participation. In the first study, qualitative interviews will be conducted with approximately 40 caregivers who have received services because of maltreatment. The purpose is to learn about perceived barriers to service participation and how these vary by the type of service. The second proposed study, a secondary analysis of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) data, will examine the predictors of caregiver use of services and whether service use is related to outcomes. The purpose of the third proposed study is to pilot an engagement intervention, which was developed for families seeking services from an urban mental health center, with families referred to home-based services because of maltreatment. Forty families will be randomly assigned to either home-based services with the engagement intervention (n=20) or home-based services without the engagement intervention (n=20). [unreadable] [unreadable]